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The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming Paperback – August 15, 2010
One of the world's leading writers on climate change tells the inside story of the events leading up to the much-publicized theft of climate-change related emails. He explores the personalities involved, the feuds and disagreements at the heart of climate science, and the implications the scandal has for the future. In November 2009 it emerged that thousands of documents and emails had been stolen from one of the top climate science centers in the world. The emails appeared to reveal that scientists had twisted research in order to strengthen the case for global warming. With the UN's climate summit in Copenhagen just days away, the hack could not have happened at a worse time for climate researchers, or at a better time for climate skeptics. Although the scandal caused a media frenzy, the fact is that just about everything the public heard and read about the University of East Anglia emails is wrong. They are not, as some have claimed, the smoking gun for a great global warming hoax, nor do they reveal a sinister conspiracy by scientists to fabricate global warming data. They do, however, raise deeply disturbing questions about the way climate science is conducted, about researchers' preparedness to block access to climate data and downplay flaws in their data, and about the siege mentality and scientific tribalism at the heart of the most important international issue of the age.
- Print length288 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House UK
- Publication dateAugust 15, 2010
- Dimensions5.5 x 1 x 9 inches
- ISBN-100852652291
- ISBN-13978-0852652299
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Product details
- Publisher : Random House UK (August 15, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 288 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0852652291
- ISBN-13 : 978-0852652299
- Item Weight : 11.2 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 1 x 9 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #2,808,805 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,152 in Environmental Policy
- #6,717 in Environmental Science (Books)
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About the author
![Fred Pearce](https://cdn.statically.io/img/m.media-amazon.com/images/I/B1C7DDQaIeS._SY600_.jpg)
Fred Pearce, author of The New Wild, is an award-winning author and journalist based in London. He has reported on environmental, science, and development issues from eighty-five countries over the past twenty years. Environment consultant at New Scientist since 1992, he also writes regularly for the Guardian newspaper and Yale University’s prestigious e360 website. Pearce was voted UK Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and CGIAR agricultural research journalist of the year in 2002, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the Association of British Science Writers in 2011. His many books include With Speed and Violence, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, The Coming Population Crash, and The Land Grabbers.
Photo Copyright Photographer Name: Fred Pearce, 2012.
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But one would be totally wrong, if one thought Pearce was merely a defender of the Climate Mainstream Scientists and a detractor of the Climate Skeptics. He starts out in chapter 1 by saying there are "no heroes" here - fault can be found in virtually all the players. Wrt the Mainstream, he comes down hard on Michael Mann (too sure of himself and verbose), Phil Jones (too eager to refuse release of data to the skeptics' FOI request), Rajendra Pachauri (too defensive about IPCC reports that actually had several mistakes in it among it's thousands of assertions), Kevin Trenberth (too quick to claim hurricane frequency was due to global warming); and not so hard on Tom Wigley (ex- CRU boss), Keith Briffa (tree ring researcher at CRU), and Stephen Schneider (Stanford U). Wrt the skeptics side, he comes down hard on Pat Michaels, Fred Seitz, Anthony Watts, Ross McKitrict, Bennie Peiser, Jim Inhofe, Myron Ebell (for being ideologically motivated and too adamant in scientific fields they did not understand fully); and not so hard on Steven McIntyre (data sleuth), Dick Lindzen (hurricane researcher from MIT), John Christy (climatologist from UAH). He discusses all the pointed technical discussions concerning the Hockey Stick, CRU email wording/context, GlacierGate, Yamal tree ring data, number of stations in the temperature data, and the accounting for Urban Heat Island effects. You will find plenty of "red meat" about CRU and Manistream Scientist "tribalism", lack of williingness to release data, and sloppiness in the caretake of data. You will also find plenty of details of who funds the many skeptics orgainzation (and a few who hide their funding), and the outlandish PR coming from that side (e.g calling GW a "hoax", with data maliciously "manipulated", the earth is actually cooling). As such both sides could use this book selectively to badmouth the other side.
But in the end, Pearce believes that the Mainstream Scientist position is the correct one as he stated in the first paragraph of the final chapter (I'd like to quote it but not sure that I should copyright-wise). Pearce just believes the details have to be cleaned up in a very public/transparent/thorough way. I agree.
After reading this, I feel a thorough reconstruction of all the available "original" data needs to be done by truly independent people doing the heavy analysis with all "sides" as watchdogs/guides all working together (may be too much to ask for). None of the three CRU email investigative teams have had the time or charter to do so. This will in all likelihood prove out the mainstream position of man-caused global warming and the need to control greenhouse gases. But nontheless the interested public needs and deserves convincing (if such is possible). I also would demand a opening up of the global warming skeptic organizations' email files/data(if they have any) to similiar scrutiny as the CRU has received, all in the interest of truth.
The book is well written (a few Britainisms) and reads like a detective story. I recommend it highly to interested parties.
To be fair I am a skeptic about anthropogenic climate change but am convinced that climate change due to natural forces is constant. This book does a good job of describing the controversy between the two camps but leans visibly to the side of the UN Panel on Climate Change. However my main concern with this book was that it was preoccupied with the controversy between the camps and did not get into the actual science behind the controversy. The science is important.
The absence of recent warming, extra cold recent winters and the return of north pole ice show the models to be far enough out of step with the predictions that the whole thing needs to be reexamined as. The programs being run are inadequate.
It also appears that bias may have crept into computer models (that's easy to do, even accidentally. I know - I'm a passable programmer).
It also seems that Ozone and other greenhouse gases have either been ignored or underestimated.
The term carbon pollution is inaccurate as CO2 is not a pollutant except in extremely high quantities and levels have been MUCH higher and life did not perish then - neither will it now.
Fact is. life as we know it depends on the presence of CO2 - beginning at the PLANT end of the food chain)
WE are made of carbon compounds and water - without CO2 we would not be having this discussion at all.
In fields like medicine and climatology that have strong effects on what people in society decide to do (get certain screenings done, spend money on expensive treatments, reduce carbon output), aside from doing research and convincing other trained scientists that their results are correct, scientists have some role in communicating these results to the public. I think there's a popularly held belief that science consists of unambiguously true statements, and thus if there is uncertainty in a scientific field some people think the field must be bunk. It seems like the scientists involved in the Climatic Research Unit email controversy didn't want conflicting views confusing a scientifically uneducated public, and thus badmouthed people who criticized them. If the CRU scientists worked more openly and were more free with their data they wouldn't have even had to deal with the pests.
The problems that people see in the CRU email controversy exist in the rest of science. People are sensitive to criticism of their work. And because the first to find something is rewarded so much more than one who verifies it, there is a strong incentive to work quickly and do poor quality work. There are hardly any rewards for reproducing scientific studies, whereas this double checking is, I think, more valuable to the scientific project than much of the original research that is done. John Ioannidis has shown that this sloppiness is prevalent in medical research, so don't think that climate science is worse than other fields. This doesn't mean that climate science ought to be excused, but that incentives need to be changed so scientists do better work.
There are dishonest sceptics whose criticisms are just propaganda and scientists shouldn't bother with them (Ross McKitrick appears this way in the book), but scientists should indeed put out work that is robust enough to survive nitpicky questioning by gadflies like Stephen McIntyre.
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